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Press Release: Sarasota, FL, June 7, 2013 / By: David Montague, The Fraud Practice LLC
We are starting to see more and more fraudsters focusing larger efforts on using account takeover to perpetrate fraud. Most likely it is because businesses aren’t focused on ATO risk today and there is a vast supply of compromised consumer and business accounts from cases of phishing, pharming, malware and data breaches. Any business that offers users the ability to setup an account or protects their customer information behind a login is at risk to account takeover and a potential target for fraud.
When it comes to gaining new customers and converting sales, there are several features and signals that a website can include make potential buyers more comfortable with purchasing from a website or brand they may not be familiar with or have never purchased from before. From upfront company and return policies to a social media presence, there are several types of messaging that can say a lot about an online business.
Daily deal website LivingSocial suffered a data breach compromising emails, passwords and more information for most of the site’s users resulting in the site requiring user’s to reset their passwords.
Many retailers and websites have mobile-optimized sites, desktop sites and redirects to pages designed for a certain device or screen size. But more recently the concept of responsive design, determining the device and screen resolution that is being used to access a site and optimizing the layout and navigation accordingly, has been growing as a popular and widely used alternative with a recent case study highlighting positive effects on sales conversion.
In today’s online environment with breaches, hacks, data compromises, credit card theft and fraud, conveying to a site visitor that your website is safe and secure is important for building trust, closing sales and making new customers. An effective way of accomplishing this is through third party verification with a security or trust seal, and there are many different organizations that offer this in North America and other world regions. However, trust seals and security seals are not the same, and different ones may be more or less recognized in different countries and regions.
A recent survey and report from Adobe found that a significant number of business do not have a mobile app or mobile-optimized site while 57 percent of companies reported average conversion rates of less than 1 percent for mobile users.
A recently signed appropriations bill contained an additional provision that several government agencies will need to get approval from law enforcement officials prior to purchasing IT products from suppliers that are from or have any connections with China. The U.S.-China Business Council has criticized the law saying that it unfairly targets Chinese firms and will cause the U.S. to lose out on foreign investment.
A recent study and report from Symantec found that targeted attacks against small businesses greatly increased in 2012 as cyberattacks increased by 42 percent overall leading to more data compromises and breaches.
Government leaders claim that the lack of authority for collecting sales tax with many online purchases costs the U.S billions each year, and to address this issue the United States Senate included a measure allowing state and local governments to collect sales tax directly from online purchases as part of their budget resolution.
As mobile devices and other technology utilize location-based data and maintain more detailed records than ever before, pre-existing laws and regulations may not properly govern how to treat this data as it was not foreseen at the time of writing, and as a result new privacy issues arise. The U.S. is considering two separate bills that address these modern privacy concerns related to geolocation and online forms of communication.
